Gerrymandering After 2020
Using dirty tricks to take state legislatures in 2010, the GOP gerrymandered the next five US House elections. Plus this sets them up for winning states in 2020 with even worse consequences.
Democrats got Rat f**ked by the Republican REDMAP project in 2010 according to author David Daley. Now, REDMAP 2020 is planning to spend five to ten times as much and more if needed. So what’s with these “zero-year” elections?! Simple …
The party that wins the state legislatures in a “zero year” gets to gerrymander (rig) the voting maps for the US House and state legislatures for the next five elections.
The terrible part is that because the Republicans won big in 2010, and the fifth rigged election is in 2020, they’ve got a huge advantage for locking in another decade of rigging. And since the Supreme Court has decided gerrymandering is constitutional, and since vote-rigging technology is better than ever, you’d better pray we can stop them this time.
In 2012, 1.4 million more Americans voted for Democrats for Congress, but Republicans won a 33-seat majority.
“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” explained David Lewis, a member of North Carolina’s General Assembly. “So I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats,” … wait for it … “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”
So with 53 percent of the state-wide vote, they won 10 out of 13 congressional seats — 77 percent. That’s gerrymandering. And it’s legal.
The Supreme Court Has Ruled it Constitutional
In the past, federal courts have ruled that some rigged election maps are illegal. But on June 27, 2019, Brett Kavanaugh tipped the balance and the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that they themselves, and all other federal courts, can’t rule on gerrymandering cases. As far as they are concerned, whatever the states and Congress allow is constitutional, no matter how warped the map.
We were REDMAPed
kicking Donald Duck
Most state legislatures gerrymander their Congressional districts every 10 years. In 2010 the Republican Redistricting Majority Project, a.k.a. REDMAP, crushed the Democrats in state contests with the intent to gerrymander to the max.
In 2010, the Democrats controlled 27 state legislatures and the Republicans, 14. After the 2010 REDMAP election, the score was Dems 15, Republicans 26. We went from being ahead by 13 to behind by 11. It was similar for state trifectas — one party controlling both houses and the governor. Before that election, the score was Dems 16, GOP 9. Afterward, the score was Dems 11, GOP 21. So in 2012, we won the national popular vote for the house, and they came out 33 seats ahead.
Since 2017 we’ve gained full control of four state legislatures and the GOP has lost two, so we are now only 12 behind — down from 16.
Now, in 2019, the score is Dems 18, GOP 30 for control of state legislatures. We are behind by one more than after 2010 — in spite of the blue wave in 2018. This is not going to be easy. But why was 2010 so important? And why is 2020 the next do-or-die election?
Why 2010? Why 2020?
It’s written into the constitution. Every 10 years the census is conducted to find the population of every state, and that is used to decide how many representatives it gets in the House.
So almost every state redraws its congressional districts right after the census results. The next results come out on March 31, 2021. So whoever wins control of state legislature in 2020 will get to do the gerrymandering. You can imagine what will happen with the federal courts out of action, hyper-polarization, modern computer technology, and all the personal data now available.
The GOP Does it More
The AP statistically analyzed the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year. They found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. The Democrats do it too, but the Republicans do it more.
Some good news: State courts and Congress can still strike down gerrymandered districts.
But with the Supreme Court saying it’s constitutional, and with computer programs that can try out thousands of maps, this problem is set to get much worse.
The longer this goes on, the worse it gets. One party gerrymanders itself a majority in the legislature, and that gives them the power to block legislative reform. Yes, they gerrymander their own state districts as well as the Congressional districts.
What’s To Be Done?
With Obama’s backing, Eric Holder, who had been his Attorney General, founded the National Democratic Redistricting Committee in October 2016. It has now merged with a previous Obama grassroots group and is called All On The Line. Its Facebook page has 2.5 million followers.
According to Ballotpedia, there are now eight states with truly independent redistricting commissions. Two of these (Colorado and Michigan) were set up by citizens initiatives in 2018, as were a few semi-independent commissions. But only about half the states or fewer allow such citizen initiatives. Also in 2015, the Supreme Court nearly declared initiatives to set up fair redistricting commissions unconstitutional.
And with Kavenaugh on the bench the court could easily reverse itself, and declare citizen initiatives for fair redistricting unconstitutional.
So taking back state legislatures will remain vitally important, and that’s the focus of the Obama-Holder organization and also of Swing Left and other grassroots organizations. It’s time to get moving on this.
Blackmail
As Michigan Republicans prepared to vote on their maps for the 2012 − 2020 elections, former Democratic state Rep. Lisa Brown was summoned into a private office where a top Republican lawmaker showed her two possible maps. One kept her home in the district that had elected her, while the other shifted her neighborhood into a Republican district. She was offered a deal: Vote with Republicans or get kicked into a red district and lose. She declined. As Brown put it, “I was gerrymandered out of my district.”
How to Gerrymander
I thought you might like to see how it’s done, so here’s the simplest example ever invented. The Blue Map and the Red Map show how gerrymandering actually works. They show one state with three representatives and nine voters. The state legislature must draw three districts with roughly equal numbers of voters.
The Blue Map is as fair as you can get. The Democrats have a popular majority and get a majority of the representatives.
The Red Map uses two gerrymandering tricks. (1) It Packs as many Dems as possible into the long diagonal district and then (2) Cracks the rest of them into small pieces spread out where they can’t win. This gives the GOP two-thirds of the representatives even though they have only 44% of the popular vote. (Of course this is ultra-simplified, but the same principles work at scale. Note in the map above that Winston-Salem and Charlotte are in the long-narrow 12th district of NC in order to pack as many Democrats together as possible.)
The battle to flip America’s state legislatures blue in 2020
Obama-Holder All On The Line, FB page
Win all the Houses in 2020 — the key to rolling back Republican gerrymandering
Ripped Apart
